ts passed in mutual praises, in questions about the
house that I had quitted, in experiments as to my character, my
inclinations, my tastes, my understanding. They feel you all over;
there is a number of little snares that they set for you, and from
which they draw the most just conclusions. For example, they throw
out some word of scandal, and then they look at you; they begin a
story, and then wait to see whether you will ask for the end or
will leave it there; if you make the most ordinary remark, they
declare that it is charming, though they know well enough that it
is nothing; they praise or they blame you with a purpose; they try
to worm out your most hidden thoughts; they question you as to what
you read; they offer you religious books and profane, and carefully
notice your choice; they invite you to some slight infractions of
the rule; they tell you little confidences, and throw out hints
about the foibles of the Lady Superior. All is carefully gathered
up and told over again. They leave you, they take you up again;
they try to sound your sentiments about manners, about piety, about
the world, about religion, about the monastic life, about
everything. The result of all these repeated experiments is an
epithet that stamps your character, and is always added by way of
surname to the name that you already bear. I was called Sister
Susan the Reserved."[12]

[12] _La Religieuse._ _Oeuv._, v. 110.

The portraits we feel to be to the life. The strongest of them all is
undoubtedly the most disagreeable, the most atrocious; it is, if you
will, the most infamous. We can only endure it as we endure to traverse
the ward for epileptics in an hospital for the insane. It is appalling,
it fills you with horror, it haunts you for days and nights, it leaves a
kind of stain on the memory. It is a possibility of character of which
the healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never dreamed. Such a
portrait is not art, that is true; but it is science, and that delivers
the critic from the necessity of searching his vocabulary for the cheap
superlatives of moral censure. Whether it be art or science, however,
men cannot but ask themselves how Diderot came to think it worth while
to execute so painful a study. The only answer is that the
irregularities of human nature--those more shameful parts of it, which
in some characters sur